How Not to Save the FA Cup

The FA Cup has been declining in prestige for a couple of decades now, for reasons that aren’t very difficult to understand. The institution of the UEFA Champions League made it a tertiary priority for the big four clubs who came to dominate English football.

Even for smaller clubs in the Premier League, the growing riches of league play made the rewards to be had in the FA Cup much less important financially than whether the club finished in seventh place or seventeenth in the league, due to the much greater prize money at stake there.

The FA Cup winner takes home £3.4 million; a minimum of £30 million is taken home for just staying in the Premier League.

This disparity in rewards did not exist until recent times. No wonder so many teams field weakened teams.

For fans, playing semi-finals at Wembley as well as the final has taken some of the lustre off the pot at the end of the tunnel, the greed of the FA making a Wembley appearance more commonplace.

Unpredictability and upsets remain, as we’ve seen this year in spades, but the media spotlight on the tournament has diminished with so much focus on European competition and the Premier League title race.

And you know it’s bad when the Football Association actually determines they need to do something about it, or it least get a committee to talk about doing something.

Unfortunately, according to the Times, they have a batty solution to reigniting interest: instead of finding a way to build off of the tradition of the world’s oldest football tournament, they instead want to bring in some gimmicks by reportedly making it a testing ground for experiments in the rules and regulations of the game:

The dilemma for the FA and its ten-man Challenge Cup Committee, which is chaired by Sir Dave Richards, the Premier League chairman, is what kind of changes to make to the competition. The FA’s hierarchy is conscious that much of the Cup’s appeal lies in its tradition, which is why there is resistance to the idea of seeding the draw, but there is a growing feeling that something needs to change. [..]

Perhaps the most intriguing idea, though, is that the FA Cup could attract greater interest by volunteering itself to be used as a stage for future experiments with the laws of the game.

Fifa, world football’s governing body, is likely to give a trial to various innovations over the coming years — having confirmed yesterday that goalline technology will be back on the agenda when the International Football Association Board meets next month — and there is a school of thought within the FA that, as a pioneering competition, it could benefit from staging such experiments in future.

It’s all very well for the FA Cup to be a pioneer and a testing ground for change. But it sure as hell isn’t going to save the grand old competition. Did a lot more people suddenly start watching the UEFA Europa League because it was featuring an experiment with additional assistant referees on the goalline? No.

The solutions are actually likely prosaic changes like more prize money, smarter scheduling and marketing the class and history of the FA Cup. Whether the FA can manage to do any of that remains to be seen.

It’s less greed on the part of the A and more that the entire financing of Wembley (ie, the corporate boxes and bank loans that paid for it) was dependent on 25 matches a year being played there, and so the semi-finals had to go there to make that number. The greed, such as it was, was in wanting an enormous stadium in a rubbish part of London.

Well, the first FA Cup semi-final was held in 1991 at Wembley, long before the financing of the new stadium was an issue. The excuse was obviously that it was Tottenham-Arsenal and the biggest London venue was needed to accommodate the demand, but the same thing happened again in ’93 and ’94 for both semi-finals.

The redevelopments of Old Trafford and Villa Park shortly after (around the time of Euro 96) probably made them more profitable venues in the 1990s after that than crumbling old Wembley at that time before it closed for redevelopment itself, as the semi-finals went there for most games from 95.

But I’d actually date some of the loss of the sense of the FA Cup as an occasion to those five semi-finals in the early 1990s, coinciding with the rise of the Champions League and Premier League. It just seemed to me to be short-sighted of the FA, and I remember thinking that at the time.

February 13, 2010 at 11:54 pmTim Vickerman

Every time the FA Cup comes around, we get the same round of tedious articles in the press (not this one, BTW!). Can’t we just enjoy the tournament for what it is? There is nothing more exciting than the latter part of a match between two fully-committed, evenly-matched teams in the latter stages of a knockout tournament for drama and excitement. We only need to go back the League Cup semis of a few weeks ago to see that.

There’s not an awful lot wrong with the FA Cup, the declining value is due purely to the modern game’s obsession with money. In terms of a club’s history and achievement, which will be remembered more fondly in years to come: 10th place in the Premier League or winning the FA Cup at Wembley? Though perhaps fans of Portsmouth may disagree at the moment.

One thing that should (but won’t) be done to enhance the prestige of the final is to take the semi-finals away from Wembley and hold them at neutral grounds more accessible to fans of both clubs involved. It’s interesting that despite Arsenal’s recent barren run in terms of winning anything, Wenger preferred to sacrifice the FA Cup in favour of their two crucial league games – how did that turn out, Arsene? He also produced a very odd team selection in last year’s semi-final with Chelsea. The national cup competition has also traditionally carried much less significance in Europe’s other major footballing countries and perhaps the increasing homogenisation of the game has contributed in some small part to this.

There was a similar article in Friday’s Guardian on this.

February 14, 2010 at 11:13 amBarry

I fully agree with you, Tim. Are you Tim Vickery in disguise by any chance?

February 15, 2010 at 2:23 amTim Vickerman

@Barry Well, we’re both football-loving Englishmen living abroad. If you substitute Spurs for Huddersfield Town and Rio for Hiroshima, we may be one and the same.

As a keen follower of an English side much lower down the pyramid than discussed in this article (Bath City – Conference South) I can assure you that interest in the FA Cup is alive and well in the lower divisions. Our biggest gate for nearly ten years was this year’s Second Round match verus Forest Green Rovers. Our average gate of just over 600 swelled to 3,325!

Why are we still interested? To be honest, it is the money. The prize money on offer for our club, even when we first enter in the Second Qualifying Round (£4,000) is a significant amount of money for us. Also, if we had beated FGR (we wuz robbed!) we would have been in the third round with a chance to draw a away match against Man U or Arsenal, etc. That would have generated hundreds of thousands of pounds for the club.

If you took away the prize money, would Bath City still be so intent on a big FA Cup run each year? I doubt it. In the Somerset Premier Cup, a cup with no prize money, our manager pulled our only named striker once we had gone down 1-0 in our very first round. He wanted to lose so we could concentrate on the league and the FA Cup. The Somerset cup isn’t very prestigeous, but I bet it would be very soon if we made money from it.